Question: What are Mammograms and Pap Smears?

Answer: Two tests that have for years been touted to save women's lives, but coincidentally have been deemed as somewhat unnecessary now that the government has taken over health care.

My mammogram piece is here; and it asks two rhetorical questions: Why is the government fighting to cut back crucial cancer testing that can save lives, while fighting to pay for abortions, which only ends lives?

The second question, well, I ask that this piece from the New York Times on why we can oh-so-easily cut back on pap smears with no serious loss of life....

New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended in the past.

The advice, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The group’s previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21.

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia....

Sure it was. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are a bit skeptical:

Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma who is also a physician, said in an interview that he would continue to offer Pap smears to sexually active young women. Democratic proposals to involve the government more deeply in the nation’s health care system, he said, would lead the new mammography, Pap smear and other guidelines to be adopted without regard to patient differences, hurting many people.

“These are going to be set in stone,” Mr. Coburn said.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Democrat and longtime advocate for cancer screening, said in an interview: “And this Pap smear guideline is yet another cut back in screening? That is curious.”

So here's my second question: Why do so many women vote Democratic, when they are vocally and actively fighting to cut back on services that help keep them alive? Why do so many women vote Democratic, when the party (and its handmaidens in the media) perform nothing less than psychological rape on them when they dare to wander off the liberal philosophical plantation?

Ann Althouse gets it, and leads us to more disparaging of women in the medical/political community (again touted in the NYT); now we learn that females in pain are just sissies that can easily - and cheaply - be forced to "man up":

We'll save even more money if we just get these women who are bitching about pain to hold their boyfriend's hand or look at a picture of their kid.

She adds:

And one thing in this emerging rationality is clear: Although women tend to love the notion of government control more than men do, it is women who will be told they'll have to cut back. On treatments. And years. You know we've been taking more than our share.

Nothing like protecting the more vulnerable members of society, right? Liberalism is virtue at a discounted price, where saving money is worth the death of two teenage girls out of every million...

Nobody has been screwed as badly by the Obama administration than women and Jews. Both of whom voted strongly for this leadership. Well, they got what they voted for. One hopes that both groups are learning their lessons - albeit the hard way - and will be sadder but wiser when they next hit the voting booths...